Alumni Profiles

Looking back on his time as both a Master’s and Ph.D. student at UBC, Paul Kry is struck by the wealth of learning opportunities the department afforded him. Remembering tough courses in computational geometry, computational robotics, and advanced graphics, Paul notes that the UBC grad classes “were very well organized and easy to follow.”
Felicity Foxx Herst, a dynamic young game designer with Silicon Sisters Interactive in Vancouver, is the daughter of a genomics researcher and a professional opera singer, Felicity grew up in a household devoted both to arts and sciences, so it’s perhaps no wonder that she gravitated toward a field that allows her to engage with her interests in both.
Dorothy Cheung’s resume shows an impressive list of educational and professional accomplishments. She’s worked in a diversity of UBC-based and private sector labs in Vancouver, including labs in UBC’s departments of botany, biotechnology, and pediatrics, the Centre for Plant Research at the UBC
Heidi Lam
Heidi Lam has an impressive string of academic credentials, but she laughs off any suggestion that she’s a super-achiever. Instead, she suggests with quiet, yet focused, determination that she’s been seeking the best way to develop her intellectual interests while being true to her personality. For Heidi, a software engineer at Google, this search to date has yielded impressive results.
For CS alum Hendrik Kueck, founder of Pocket Pixels of Vancouver, BC, the iPhone display represents the intersection of his passion for aesthetics and his intellectual interest in problem-solving, mapped to his desire to merge the two in fun and functional apps for consumers.
For Katayoon Kasaian, perhaps the most exciting thing about the BCS program was the co-op program. She was placed at the Genome Sciences Centre (GSC) at the BC Cancer Agency, working as an annotator for the open source database the agency maintains. “And for me,” she says, “this was magical. It really clicked with me.”
When David He took professor the 314 graphics class, he thought ‘Oh my god, this is what I’m here for! That was the first time in my life when I stayed up for days without sleeping, working on an assignment." The excitement of that discovery propelled David into a co-op placement with Electronic Arts, then considered top in the gaming industry.
Andrew Ip had a spotty background with computers prior to entering UBC. “Most of my experience,” he says with a grin, “came through playing computer games.” In high school he had become interested in web development so enrolled in a CS class in the fall of 1999. What ensued ultimately led to his success.
Elena Kholondyreva
When Elena Kholondyreva was 10 years old, she had a hankering for a Barbie-styled dollhouse. In her hometown in Belarus, such dollhouses didn’t exist. So, Elena decided to build one. “But it was a house with a difference,” she says laughing. “I wired it with electricity and had a little 10-switch panel that controlled the lighting in all of the rooms. It even had a glowing fireplace made with red lights.”
Dr. Sohrab Shah
Through largely self-taught work in web design, Sohrab Shah realized there were “some interesting things going on under the hood,” in computer science. Sohrab decided to enroll in UBC CS for a second bachelor’s degree. After researching his options, he decided on UBC’s computer science department. Making this switch proved serendipitous to say the least...